Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The same men and women who have spent the past two nights patting themselves on the back for increasing child benefit over the past decade are the ones who have mortgaged our children's future for decades to come, in the form of NAMA and robbing children to pay the banks.

They are looking to children and families to pay for the consequences of this economic crisis but they are very silent on its causes. In this, they are sadly aided by the Green Party, a party ostensibly so committed to children that it put them at the heart of its election campaign in 2007. Where are those values now? I do not recall any proposal being put to the Green Party conference which required a two thirds majority to cut child benefit. It was not in the revised programme for Government. There is no obligation under the revised programme for Government for it to support this measure.

The Government has focused on its role in increasing child benefit payments to families in the past. However, this motion is not about the past. Rather, it is about the effect of a cut in child benefit payments will have on families and children now and into the future. The cut in child benefit is coming on top of a significant reduction in family incomes over the past twelve months. Families have already been hit with a reduction in mortgage interest relief, the cutting of child benefit for 18 year olds, a large increase in school transport costs, the halving of the early childcare supplement, which will be abolished from January and income levies. For the 150,000 people who have joined the live register since this time last year, child benefit is often a lifeline which helps keep food on the table and the house warm, even if one parent still has a job.

Since the emergency budget in April I have received hundreds of letters, many from concerned mothers who say that between the income levies and the pension levy for public servants they are barely able to make ends meet. For young parents with large mortgages and high child care costs, a cut in child benefit will create a genuine crisis.

The Government has indicated it favours a three-tiered system for child benefit, comprising those on social welfare and low incomes, those who are very well-off and who identify themselves as such to the Revenue Commissioners and those in the middle. This is a deeply flawed and fundamentally unfair proposal. First, making child benefit conditional on receiving social welfare or the family income supplement will act as yet another poverty trap, where it costs people money to move into paid work. Second, it is risible that the Government, which has consistently facilitated tax avoidance by the super-rich, should propose to rely on those same wealthy people putting their hands up and handing back their child benefit. We all know who is going to bear the brunt of any cut in child welfare. It will be those in the middle, namely, PAYE workers who pay for everything and who receive little for it who will bear the brunt.

One can only tap the same source for so long before it runs dry. Child benefit is not, as some would characterise it, a contribution towards the luxuries of life. For the overwhelming majority it is money which parents count on to pay for child care, for trips to the doctor, for food and clothing for their children. For tens of thousands of families in this recession it is a crucial source of household income which just about keeps them afloat.

Fianna Fáil congratulates itself on the generosity of the child benefit payment, but it must be seen in context. Child benefit is the Swiss knife of the social welfare system. It is supposed to compensate for the fact that Ireland's tax code does not recognise the cost of bringing up children, to address child poverty, to make up for the lack of affordable child care or the fact that Ireland, almost uniquely in the European Union, does not have a universal pre-school system. It is meant to compensate for the absence of free medical care for children.

No welfare payment, however generous, could achieve all of these objectives. It requires the vision to invest in an affordable, national child care system. It requires the courage to introduce universal health insurance for children, as the Labour Party has proposed since 2002. In short, it requires a value system which works the well-being of children and families into the permanent structures of our society and State.

There is, however, little evidence of such values in the policies being pursued by this Government. Ministers never miss an opportunity to remind people that they increased social welfare rates during the good years. However, now that the good years are over they tell us they can no longer afford these payments. The Government's policy now appears to be Fianna Fáil giveth and Fianna Fáil taketh away, but the people answer to that in the course of time may well be that the people giveth and the people taketh away.

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